Calendar software is available that runs on networked information handling systems (IHSs) to enable users to more easily schedule meetings and events over a network rather than by telephone. For example, several local client IHSs connect via a network to a server IHS that includes server calendar software. Each client IHS includes client calendar software. A meeting leader or organizer may use the calendar software to send meeting invitations that designate a particular time, duration and place to prospective meeting participants. The prospective participants may accept or decline the invitations depending on their available free time. This approach may take several iterations until all the participants agree on a particular meeting day and time.
Rather than using electronic calendar software to organize a meeting or other event, several reasons exist that cause meeting organizers to manually email or otherwise manually poll each prospective participant to gather free time information from them. Often a meeting organizer will send a manually generated schedule table to prospective participants to determine common free time from the prospective participants. A typical schedule table includes rows wherein one row corresponds to the meeting leader and the remaining rows correspond to prospective participants. The schedule table may also include columns that correspond to respective days when a meeting or event may occur. The prospective participants receive the schedule table via email and then fill in the schedule table to show when they are free to meet. The prospective meeting participants then manually send the marked-up schedule table back to the meeting organizer via email. The meeting organizer studies the schedule table received from each prospective participant to determine a common free time that all prospective participants have available for the meeting. This process is manual because it does not rely on an automatic free time scheduler in calendar software.
Modern calendar and scheduling software applications often include automatic free time schedulers. Calendar users may choose to display their free time to all meeting organizers, to particular meeting organizers, to meeting organizers in a particular group or to no organizers. When a meeting organizer selects participants for a new meeting, the organizer's calendar program displays the free time of the participants to the extent that the participants allow the display of their free time information.
Several reasons exist why a meeting organizer or secretary would use the manual process with a schedule table described above instead of any automatic free time scheduler built into calendar software. For example, meetings may include participants outside of a particular business entity wherein those participants employ incompatible calendar software. Another reason is that participants may choose to hide their free time information from calendar software. Yet another reason is that participants may not regularly update their free time information on their calendar software, and thus the free time that their calendar software indicates is not reliable. Still another reason is that depending on the importance of the meeting, participants may elect to include free times in their response that otherwise appear as unavailable in an automatic free time scheduler in calendar software. For example, if a meeting is very important a participant may show their lunch hour as available free time, whereas if a meeting is of low importance the participant may show that time as unavailable.
The current manual method of gathering of free time information by sending a schedule table via email is straightforward. However, this method is labor intensive and thus prone to error, especially as the number of prospective participants increases. Unfortunately, the current manual method of gathering free time information frequently requires multiple iterations to achieve consensus on a common free time for all participants.
What is needed a method of gathering free time information from prospective meeting participants that addresses the above problems.